from the rather-incredible dept

Today, as you may have heard, is Internet Slowdown Day, in which a bunch of folks are calling attention to the fight at the FCC concerning net neutrality. The basic idea -- as you may have seen on this very site -- is to host some "spinning wheel" banners, highlighting the kind of internet that we may have to live with if the big broadband providers get their way and are allowed to set up tollbooths online, picking winners and losers based on who will pay the most. We've been hearing that the big broadband players are a bit nervous about this -- as often seems to happen when it comes to real grassroots efforts. They've attempted to set up some fake grassroots efforts. We've even heard rumors that they've been trying to "infiltrate" planning meetings for Internet Slowdown Day. But this one takes the cake. In response to this campaign, cable's main lobbying arm, NCTA, has launched an advertising campaign that... um... looks kinda like the Internet Slowdown Day campaign, reminding people that they're nervous about Big Cable cutting off access. Here are two of the ads NCTA is currently running:

Of course, if you look at those ads, they actually (1) look like they're a part of Internet Slowdown Day and (2) remind people of exactly what they fear most about Big Cable: the inability to connect to certain sites. No one (and I do mean no one) thinks that, if the FCC implements true open internet rules, they'll suddenly be "unable to connect" to any particular sites. The only place where that's a fear is if the FCC doesn't put in place good rules and allows companies, like the cable companies NCTA represents, to start blocking access to certain sites.

So, either this a case where some ad designer at NCTA is a subversive double agent really helping "Team Internet," or the folks at NCTA and Big Cable are really so buried in their own wonkdom, they don't realize just how much this ad appears to support the other team. Either way, thanks, Big Cable and your lobbyists for highlighting exactly what most of us fear. An internet where we are "unable to connect" to sites because the FCC has killed off net neutrality...

from the verification-to-be-performed-at-gunpoint dept

We recently covered a story about a lawyer who found himself approached by cops with guns drawn after an automatic license plate reader misread a single character on his plate as he drove by. The police did make an attempt to verify the plate but were stymied by heavy traffic. Unfortunately, it appears they decided to force the issue rather than let a potential car thief escape across the state line.

As I pointed out then, the increasing reliance on ALPRs, combined with the one-billion-plus records already in storage and the millions being collected every day, means the number of errors will only increase as time goes on -- even as the technology continues to improve. This person was lucky to escape with nothing more than an elevated heart rate. Others won't be so lucky... like Denise Green of San Francisco.

Green's civil rights lawsuit has just been reinstated by Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which overturned an earlier decision that granted summary judgment in favor of the San Francisco Police Department. The lower court found that the officers had made a "good faith, reasonable mistake" when they performed a felony stop of Green, which included being ordered out of her vehicle and onto the ground at gunpoint and held in cuffs for nearly 20 minutes while officers verified the plates and filled out paperwork.

It is undisputed that the ALPR occasionally makes false “hits” by misreading license plate numbers and mismatching passing license plate numbers with those listed as wanted in the database. Because of the known flaws in the system, SFPD officers are trained that an ALPR hit does not automatically justify a vehicle stop, and SFPD directs its officers to verify the validity of the identified hit before executing a stop.

Patrol officers are instructed to take two steps to verify a hit before acting on an ALPR read. The first step is to visually confirm the license plate (to ensure that the vehicle actually bears the license plate number identified by the camera); the second step is to confirm with the system that the identified plate number has actually been reported as stolen or wanted.

The opinion notes that the SFPD, at the time of the incident, actually had no official verification policy in place that designated which officer(s) should perform this task. The expert testifying on behalf of the PD indicated that it would most likely be performed by the operator of the "camera car" (the vehicle with the ALPR) but was unable to point to any policy actually stating this.

So, there's one level of failure. It could be that all of the officers involved (at least four, according to court documents) thought someone else had handled the verification. That would be an "honest mistake," but that shouldn't allow the department to escape being held accountable for its lack of clear verification procedures.

On the night of March 30, 2009, Appellant Denise Green, a 47-year-old African-American woman with no criminal record, was driving her vehicle, a 1992 burgundy Lexus ES 300 with license plate number 5SOW350, on Mission Street in San Francisco. At approximately 11:15 PM, Green passed a police cruiser equipped with an ALPR operated by SFPD Officers Alberto Esparza and Robert Pedersen. When Green drove past Esparza and Pedersen’s camera car, the ALPR misread her license plate number and identified her plate as belonging to a stolen vehicle. It was late and dark outside, which rendered the ALPR photograph blurry and illegible. As a result, Officer Esparza could not read the ALPR photograph, nor could he get a direct visual of Green’s license plate.

Esparza was currently involved in an arrest, so he radioed in the hit. He identified the vehicle as a dark Lexus with the plate number 5SOW750, one digit off from Green's actual number. Dispatch ran the number and found that the plate belonged to a stolen gray GMC truck. The opinion notes that Esparza never bothered to inform dispatch that he had not verified the plate number himself and was working from a lousy ALPR photo.

Sergeant Kim was in the area and heard the radio traffic linking the plate (5SOW750) to a grey pickup and Esparza's observance of a dark Lexus. Kim had plenty of chances to clear up the misidentified plate, but he never did so.

Sergeant Kim saw that the first three numbers of Green’s license plate matched the plate read over the radio, but he did not visually identify all seven numbers on Green’s license plate. He also radioed Officer Esparza for a description of the vehicle, and Officer Esparza confirmed that the vehicle he saw was a dark burgundy Lexus. Sergeant Kim then decided to make a “high-risk” or “felony” stop...

Because Sergeant Kim believed that Green posed a risk, he waited for backup before pulling her over. While he waited, he followed her vehicle for a brief amount of time and, at one point, even stopped behind her at a red light. At no point while he was following or stopped behind Green’s vehicle did Sergeant Kim visually confirm the entirety of Green’s license plate number, even though nothing obscured his ability to do so. Furthermore, Sergeant Kim did not confirm Green’s plate number with dispatch, but he did hear Officer Esparza inquire whether the vehicle with the plate number 5SOW750 was stolen. Sergeant Kim admits that if he had read the full plate, he would not have had the reasonable suspicion to effect the stop.

But the stop was made and Green was approached by at least four officers with weapons drawn. She was restrained, cuffed and held while the SFPD officers finally got around to verifying the plate number on her vehicle.

The SFPD, while fighting Greene's Fourth Amendment claims, chose to spin Officer Esparza's lack of verbal confirmation that he had personally observed the plate (rather than the ALPR's lousy photo) as a credible, non-verbal assertion that could "reasonably" prompt other officers into action. Sergeant Kim took Esparza's lack of information to be an affirmation of his visual verification of Greene's plate, giving him the reasonable suspicion to effect the stop. The court approaches this argument from another angle, stating that Esparza's lack of confirmation should have been an indication that Kim needed to perform additional verification.

Because of the SFPD's lack of clear policy and the Officer Kim's willingness to believe Esparza's unstated claims, the officers effected a felony stop based on very little information and a whole lot of belief. Neither of these are enough to rise to the level of "reasonable suspicion," and certainly not enough to justify the amount of force deployed -- especially considering Greene was "physically unthreatening" and compliant during the whole stop.

Once again, we see law enforcement deploying technology without guidelines for usage. (We also see Sgt. Kim's reluctance to spoil a felony stop by actually reading a license plate that was directly in front of him for several minutes...) Many police departments tend to prefer unsupervised tech, an attitude that is increasingly resulting in policy being set by lawsuit. Abuse first, settle later, and lastly, institute guidelines. It's a hell of a way to "enforce law," when everyone's being policed but the police.

from the 80%-of-the-time,-it-works-EVERY-time dept

When deploying technology that has the potential to put actual human beings behind bars, what should be the acceptable margin of error? Most human beings, especially those who haven't committed any crime due to their natural aversion to being housed with actual criminals, would prefer (as if they had a choice) this number to be as close to zero as humanly (and technologically) possible.

Documents acquired by EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) show the FBI rolled out a ton of new tech (under the name NGI -- "Next Generation Identification") with some very lax standards. While fingerprints are held to a more rigorous margin of error (5% max -- which is still a 1-in-20 "acceptable" failure rate), facial recognition is allowed much more leeway. (The TAR [True Acceptance Rate] details begin on page 247.)

NGI shall return the correct candidate a minimum of 85% of the time when it exists in the searched repository, as a result of facial recognition search in support of photo investigation services.

NGI shall return the incorrect candidate a maximum of 20% of the time, as a result of facial recognition search in support of photo investigation services.

The FBI's iris recognition program is subjected to a similar lack of rigor.

NGI shall return the correct candidate a minimum of 98% of the time when it exists in the searched repository, as a result of iris recognition search in support of iris investigation services.

NGI shall return the incorrect candidate a maximum of 10% of the time, as a result of iris recognition search in support of iris investigation services.

These documents date back to 2010, so there's every reason to believe the accuracy of the software has improved. Even so, the problem is that the FBI decided potentially being wrong 20% of the time was perfectly acceptable, and no reason to delay implementation.

Presumably, the FBI does a bit more investigation on hits in its NGI database, but it's worrying that an agency like this one -- one that hauls people in for statements wholly dependent on an FBI agent's interpretation (the FBI remains camera-averse and uses its own transcriptions of questioning as evidence) -- would so brazenly move forward with tech that potentially could land every fifth person in legal hot water, simply because the software "thought" the person was a bad guy.

Making this worse is the fact that the FBI still hasn't updated its 2008 Privacy Impact Assessment, despite the fact it told Congress in 2012 that it had a new assessment in the works.

On top of the brutal (but "acceptable") margin of error is the fact that the FBI has made a habit of deploying nearly every form of privacy-invasive technology without putting together even the most minimal of guidelines or privacy-aware policies. Apparently, these concerns only need to be dealt with when and if they're pointed out by OIG reports or lawsuits brought by privacy advocates.

from the controlling-the-horizontal-and-vertical-but-mainly-the-'purchases' dept

Does DRM stop (or even slow down) piracy? This question's hardly hypothetical. It's been answered with a resounding "no" all over the internet. Of course, it's been argued that DRM was never about piracy prevention, but instead was a vehicle for content owners to control the technology in the hands of the end users. If so, the answer isn't much different. It may provide a sense of control, but those who want to enjoy their purchased content on devices outside the confines of the imposed restrictions will easily find a workaround or two simply by doing a small bit of searching.

Whatever DRM's stated purpose is, there's only one thing it does extremely well: inconvenience paying customers. Acetrax, a video-on-demand service that serves millions of customers across Europe, is closing on June 21st. Unlike other service closures, Acetrax is at least providing a sort of "exit strategy" for purchasers, but it's one filled with busywork and limitations. [h/t to Techdirt reader techflaws for sending this in.]

After [the June 21st shutdown], owners of Windows PCs can download their films. Mac users can forget it, as can anyone hoping to re-download HD films. Even on Windows, it's standard definition only from that point.

Movies that users have previously downloaded will cease to play from that date, so re-downloading films is mandatory if you want to continue to be able to watch them. Re-downloaded films will be tied solely to the machine on which they're first played. Because they use Microsoft's Windows Media Player DRM, the films can't be transferred to any platform that doesn't support the copy-protection technology.

Acetrax has provided a FAQ that details everything purchasers can and can't do with their purchased movies. As stated above, purchased movies are standard def only and are tied to a single device running Windows Media Player. Purchasers will also need to set aside a bit of time to validate their already-purchased movies (and hope they're not rubbing up against a providers' data cap).

From the Acetrax FAQ:

If you're watching on a laptop or PC (not including Mac), movies you've bought in standard definition (SD) are available to download directly from Acetrax.com. Just go to ‘My Movies' and click on the download icon. Once the download is finished, you'll need to have the latest version of Windows Media Player installed in order to watch it. Make sure you have the necessary rights on your computer and at least 2GB of hard-disk drive free on your PC or laptop so you have sufficient space to store the movie. Once the movie has successfully downloaded, you will need to play the movie for at least 5 minutes for us to validate the movie licence on your computer.

This sort of time-killer is only going to make former Acetrax customers more hesitant to purchase digital downloads from online services and, obviously, those who have spent the most money will be wasting the most time re-downloading and re-verifying movies they've previously purchased.

On a more positive note, Acetrax isn't limiting its offer to apologies and DRM to-do lists. Purchasers of HD movies are entitled to refunds, along with customers carrying unused credit on their accounts. (Caveat: refunds limited to those with PayPal or ClickandBuy accounts -- another unnecessary limitation, but at least it's the same as the options allowed for purchasing and renting.)

While Acetrax is handling this shutdown better than others have in the same situation, the decision to lace its offerings with DRM causes the greatest headache for those purchasing the most. If Acetrax had decided to go DRM-free (not likely, considering the amount of major Hollywood films it carried), this shutdown would have been painless for its paying users.

from the about-time dept

Back in 2010 there was all sorts of buzz around News Corp. investing a ton of money into a "secret" project to launch an iPad-only paywalled publication called "the Daily." Before it even launched, we explained why this was a bad idea that missed the point. We also highlighted Rupert Murdoch/News Corps' long list of failed internet projects -- with the large majority of them flopping because they were about trying to create "broadcast" style properties online, without recognizing that the internet is more of a communications (many-to-many) medium than a broadcast (one-to-many) medium. And, of course, soon after The Daily launched there was evidence that very few people cared.

To be honest, given all the bad press about how few people were reading it, combined with stories of staffers jumping ship soon after it was launched, I had kind of figured that The Daily had already been shut down. However, the latest news is that News Corp. is finally putting it out of its misery and shutting it down, giving most staffers 3 months severance. A few staffers are being folded into the NY Post:

News Corporation also announced that effective immediately, Jesse Angelo, the founding Editor-in-Chief of The Daily and long-time Executive Editor of The New York Post, will assume the role of Publisher of The New York Post. As part of a digital restructuring initiative, the company will cease standalone publication of The Daily iPad app on December 15, 2012, though the brand will live on in other channels. Technology and other assets from The Daily, including some staff, will be folded into The Post.

Mr. Murdoch said: “From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation. Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term..."

Apparently the site was losing $30 million a year.

Perhaps this should stand as a response to the people who insist that giving away newspaper content free online was "the original sin" of the industry and they should have focused on paywalls. Paywalls don't help you build up "a large enough audience." The link above quotes a reporter there saying: "It was a really cool, hip product. I think this is nothing more than bad timing." I'd say it was much more of a bad model -- both business model and delivery model -- than "bad timing."

from the wow dept

This is definitely a surprise, but it looks like AT&T finally read all the writing on the wall, and realized it was unlikely to win its fight with the DOJ and FCC and has officially killed its plan to try to purchase T-Mobile... meaning that it now has to pay the $4 billion breakup fee. While the trend of where this was heading was becoming increasingly obvious over the past few months, it's still pretty shocking on the whole. Getting big mergers like this through had become pretty standard, and AT&T (especially) excelled at the political dealing to make such things work. However, the growing public outcry and concerns over the lack of competition that would result seemed to finally have had a real impact.

from the say-that-again dept

One of the politicians instrumental in creating the TSA, Rep. John Mica, who wrote the legislation that established the TSA, has apparently decided that the whole thing has been a failure and should be dismantled. He notes that "the whole program has been hijacked by bureaucrats."

“It mushroomed into an army,” Mica said. “It’s gone from a couple-billion-dollar enterprise to close to $9 billion.”

As for keeping the American public safe, Mica says, “They’ve failed to actually detect any threat in 10 years.”

“Everything they have done has been reactive. They take shoes off because of [shoe-bomber] Richard Reid, passengers are patted down because of the diaper bomber, and you can’t pack liquids because the British uncovered a plot using liquids,” Mica said.

“It’s an agency that is always one step out of step,” Mica said.

It cost $1 billion just to train workers, which now number more than 62,000, and “they actually trained more workers than they have on the job,” Mica said.

“The whole thing is a complete fiasco,” Mica said.

There's a lot more at that link. Now, one could (and perhaps should) note that when Mica wrote the legislation, his particular political party was in power, and now it's not. So the cynical voice might say that his words are somewhat politically motivated. And one can (and probably should) ask how it was that Mica didn't expect this kind of result. This is what the government does. It creates agencies that are then "hijacked by bureaucrats." While it's nice to see him realizing this now, it's too bad he didn't see it back then.

from the total-fail dept

You may have heard that Duke Nukem Forever finally came out after a decade plus of being vaporware. It's no secret that the original team behind the game was somewhat obsessive-compulsive about not releasing a bad game -- so much so that they never released any game, and kept restarting the project entirely. After 3D Realms finally went under, someone else took control and put together a game... but the initial reviews have been scathing, and suggest that the game should have stayed vaporware.

"Too many went too far with their reviews... we r reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn't based on today's venom."

That's a huge no-no in the business, because it suggests the whole review business is a tit-for-tat setup, where you only get product if you give good reviews. Jim Redner, the guy behind the tweet removed the tweet, and admitted that he got caught up in the emotion:

It is not my intention to bully anyone. I over reacted. I just voiced an opinion. I have poured my heart into this project and I just want it to succeed.

That's all pretty unfortunate. Of course, this is the nature of the game, if you do this kind of thing. It's also one of the reasons we've tended to stay away from ever dealing with PR people. We don't do product reviews like that, and in part it's because we didn't want to have to deal with this kind of thing. Still, in the end, such a reaction tends to reflect even worse on the game because it calls into question any positive reviews.

from the too-big-to-fail? dept

Certainly a common enough theme around these parts is the effort of old companies with legacy business models to do everything in their power (often through regulatory capture and other political tricks) to retain their market position by regulating in a specific way. This means regulations that empower legacy firms specifically, or by outlawing and/or limiting disruptive upstarts. All too often, these firms succeed in convincing politicians (and even the press and some portion of the public) that their own potential failures mean the failure of a larger industry as a whole. And yet, that's almost never the case. In fact, the protectionism often does the exact opposite of that, in that it prevents the necessary innovations from flourishing, thereby limiting an industry and, at times, making it uncompetitive with other industries in other countries.

A recent Planet Money episode discussed this in talking to economist Tim Harford about his new book, Adapt, which talks about how important failure is for economic growth and innovation. This should intuitively make sense for many regular Techdirt readers, since we make this point, in a different manner, quite frequently.

In the Planet Money episode, they do a "walking tour of failure in New York," looking at things like the Gutenberg bible, which many credit with kicking off a revolution in printing, but was a giant commercial failure for Johannes Gutenberg, who put up the money for it, but couldn't find the buyers (yes, for the first printed edition of the best selling book of all time). Elsewhere, they talk about the failure of Woolworth, which had been an early retail innovator, being one of the first retailers to realize that putting goods out where customers could see them and touch them, rather than cramming it all behind a counter, was a good idea. But, eventually, others out-innovated Woolworth as well. In many ways, this reminds me of the book Copycats by Oded Shenkar, which we spoke about last year and which had plenty of similar stories.

Some of the discussion also reminded me of our discussion on the series of economic studies that have shown that people changing jobs is often a key indicator of economic growth because it helps the spread of ideas and innovations faster across the economy. While that might not seem to directly impact the question of "failure," Harford mentions the research of economist Randall Morck, who found that (and I'm paraphrasing from Harford's brief summary of Morck's work) in places where there is greater turnover of big companies failing and upstarts taking their place, there is greater economic growth. I have to admit being unaware of Morck's work previously, but now have it on my list to dig in and check it out. I can definitely see a connection here.

Big companies often get stagnant, focusing less on innovation and more on protecting a market. In the Clayton Christensen world of the Innovator's Dilemma, they focus on incremental innovations and market protectionism. And, as Andy Kessler noted in his most recent book, the innovators, who get around those things and unleash value, are often derided as thieves and criminals for undermining established business models. But what comes out of those upstart efforts is, generally, much better for the consumer. And, on top of that, the collapse of those big firms often allows many of the folks, who did have good ideas and knowledge within those firms, to spread out and to join the more innovative upstarts, which will actually implement and execute on those good ideas, rather than be stymied by bosses who don't want to undercut the old business models.

This is why we should always be wary of efforts by politicians to protect jobs, companies, industries and business models. These efforts may come from a reasonable place -- in the belief that it's for the best to "protect" such a large company. But history has shown over and over again the value of creative destruction and disruptive innovation. While it may take down old legacy players, what rises in its place is almost always better for everyone.

from the looking-backwards,-not-looking-forward dept

John Temple, the former editor, president and publisher of the now shuttered Rocky Mountain News, has been running a great blog about issues from the newspaper industry over the past few months. He consistently has been saying stuff that made me wonder why the Rocky Mountain News didn't seem to do the sorts of things he seemed to constantly talk about... and now he's explained why. He recently gave a talk at Google about lessons from the collapse of the Rocky Mountain News in both text and video form. It's long, but well worth watching/reading:

You should take in the whole thing, rather than just reading my summary, but he basically goes over the last decade and a half or so of mistakes that the Rocky Mountain News made in terms of trying to figure out the online business. The key takeaways aren't that surprising if you're a regular reader around here. The company kept defining itself as a newspaper company, not a news organization (or, better yet, a community builder). Everything it did was based on how it would impact the paper edition. The focus was not on competing with web properties and services, but on the other major newspaper in town, the Denver Post. Things got so bad that when the Columbine Massacre happened, the newsroom refused to give any news to the web people, because they were afraid that the Denver Post would "steal" it.

It seems like pretty much everything was based on looking backwards, not forward. There was little effort to figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset.

The talk is amazingly honest, coming from someone who accepts a share of the blame for what happened, and should be required reading/viewing for anyone in the media business, new or old. The same game is playing out not just in newspapers, but in a number of other businesses as well. Like the Rocky Mountain News, those businesses are looking backwards and defining themselves on the wrong terms, while newer startups don't have such legacy issues to deal with.